A man savaged by a grizzly bear while mountain biking fought off the animal by stabbing it with a 2in pocket knife – and then cycled four miles to get help.Colin Dowler was out in the backwoods of British Columbia exploring possible hiking routes when he turned a corner and encountered the huge grizzly at a distance of about 30m, the BBC reported.He had hoped the bear would avoid confrontation and pass him by, or retreat into trees near the logging trail on Mount Doogie Dowler, named for his grandfather.But the animal approached him with “methodical, heavy swats” of its paws, Mr Dowler told the broadcaster. He tried talking it down, he said, telling it: ”I know this is your territory, I’m just passing through, we don’t have to do this.”When the grizzly did not retreat the 45-year-old tried throwing his bike at it, to no avail. Then it lunged, sinking its teeth into his stomach.Mr Dowler told Canadian broadcaster CBC: “It grabbed me by the stomach and kind of pushed me down and dragged me toward the ditch maybe 50 feet. I tried eye gouging it away and it didn’t really work.”The bear also bit into his limbs during the 29 July attack, the reports said.He added: “It sounded like it was grating my bones up. “Somehow, I don’t know how I did it. I used both hands to pull underneath the bear to get to that knife, and I grabbed the knife … and stabbed the bear in his neck.“It let go of me immediately. It was bleeding quite badly, I wasn’t really sure if it was dying faster than I was.”Once free of the bear’s jaws Mr Dowler reportedly made a tourniquet from his shirt and rode some 4.3 miles before finding help, in the form of five logging camp workers who gave first aid and called for an air ambulance.Mr Dowler, a father of two, is now recovering at Vancouver General Hospital.The bear was reportedly tracked down and killed by wildlife officers.

US-backed forces said Sunday thousands of people were believed to still be inside the last Islamic State group enclave in eastern Syria, as they sought to flush out die-hard fighters with airstrikes and shelling. Tens of thousands of dishevelled women, children and men have streamed out of a small pocket in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border in recent weeks — and they still keep coming. The huge numbers have flummoxed the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and slowed down their offensive aimed at dealing a knock-out blow to the jihadists’ once-sprawling proto-state.

Kurdish-led forces battled jihadists defending their last village on Saturday as operations were relaunched to flush out the Islamic State group from eastern Syria after several days of humanitarian evacuations. The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces pushed into Baghouz, a tiny hamlet near the Iraqi border where IS fighters have been making a desperate last stand. An official for the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which forms the backbone of the SDF, on Saturday said they had breached the jihadists’ perimeter.

Kurdish-led forces launched a final assault Friday on the last pocket held by the Islamic State group in eastern Syria, their spokesman said. The Syrian Democratic Forces have been closing in on the holdout jihadists since September last year and a few hundred surviving IS members are now boxed into an area of around less than half a square kilometre. The “operation to clear the last remaining pocket of ISIS has just started”, SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali, said in a statement using another acronym for the jihadist group.

Bodies and severed heads have been found in a mass grave near the Islamic State group’s last bastion in eastern Syria, a Kurdish spokesman said Thursday. “A mass grave was discovered about 10 days ago in a liberated area” near Baghouz, said Adnan Afrin, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). “It contains the bodies of men as well as the severed heads of women,” he told AFP.

The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which has steadily driven the jihadists down the Euphrates, has surrounded them at Baghouz near the Iraqi border, but does not want to mount a final attack until all civilians are out. Iraqi sources said the SDF handed over more then 150 Iraqi and other foreign jihadists to Iraq on Thursday, under a deal involving a total of 502. The SDF had expected to pull the last civilians from Baghouz on Thursday, but trucks it sent in left empty.

Syrian fighters backed by artillery fire from a US-led coalition battled a fierce jihadist counteroffensive as they pushed to retake a last morsel of territory from the Islamic State group in an assault lasting days. More than four years after the extremists declared a “caliphate” across large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq, several offensives have whittled that down to a tiny scrap of land in eastern Syria. The final push to expel hundreds of diehard jihadists from that patch on the Iraq border was announced Saturday by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Syria’s regime drew closer to taking full control of Eastern Ghouta on Monday as state media reported that fighters began evacuating the last rebel-held pocket of the former opposition stronghold near Damascus. A Russian-brokered deal had been reported on Sunday for fighters with Jaish al-Islam, the largest rebel group still in Ghouta, to leave the enclave’s main town of Douma. The retaking of Eastern Ghouta would mark a major milestone in President Bashar al-Assad’s efforts to regain control of territory seized by rebel factions during Syria’s seven-year civil war.